An Owl Comes to Town

March 24, 2008

Out of the storm last Thursday an owl let itself down in Bleecker Gardens, an intellectual retreat that lies between 11th and Perry along the street from which it got its name. The classical bird, with the wisdom of its strain, swooped through the snow into a setting of writers, architects, sundry intellectuals, and the Van Dorens (who live there), and was admired extensively. One of the tenants even rose pajama-clad from a bed of Asian flu to view the visitor. Possibly bored with being bird-watched, Athena’s sage fowl stayed only a few hours and took off at 4:30 in the afternoon. Best guess for the owl’s presence: it was blown off-course by the gusty snowstorm.

“It was of the long-eared variety,” an observer told The Voice. “Horned?” we asked. “Who knows?” replied our informant. “That’s his own business.”

Oh, Bohemia

“The mellow landmarks of Greenwich Village are rapidly disappearing beneath modern glass monuments to the bourgeois respectability against which the Bohemians revolted forty years ago.” — Ira Henry Freeman in the New York Times, December 8, 1957.

We doubt that, Sir. We have heard there are still some very mellow landmarks roundabout. In order to prove our point we are going to send our reporters out to trail the Bohemians, the beat ones, the flips, to the squalor of their pads, to prove that Greenwich Village is as uninhabitable as it ever was. We hope to spread the facts before the public when we have the proof to document our thesis. — The Editors.

[Each weekday morning, we post an excerpt from another issue of the Voice, going in order from our oldest archives. Visit our Clip Job archive page to see excerpts back to 1956.]